Do you want to be told by the government what you can and can not do with your life?...blah, blah, blah. -CaliforniaisADream

Where do they get this crap? Do they know it's crap, but repeat it anyway, or are they this seriously deluded about the merits of the current debate? Bed-wetters? Paranoid szychophrenics? Are they paid shills for the health care industry; the Republicans, who have made it clear that their political resuscitation depends on defeating health care reform, at any cost? Have you read the bill, they ask, in their most unctious concern troll rhetoric. Even if they have, they do not understand a word of it as was made abundantly clear by Betsy McCaughey on Jon Stewart the other day.

Rationing health care? I defy any of these loons to justify the current rationing of health care that goes on in the United States every day with factotums in business offices, who are not doctors, making decisions about what is and is not needed to treat the patient and to whom and to whom they will not sell insurance. Oh, the glories of the free market!

They have computers, these bottom feeders, they don't take their medications and then come on the Internet to spam their clueless, paranoid nonsense and we have to spend time wadding through their vomit. Oh, Democracy!

They just hate and fear the government. They don't know why they do, they just do. It's so American. Annoyingly, their hate and fear would not be misplaced except that they are always hating and fearing the government over the wrong things.

Yes, the American people have been conditioned to assume the government can't do anything right. But those who sold them on that premise bear disproportionate responsibility for the federal deficit, Reagan and Bush II. So it becomes self-fulfilling.

The Republicans run campaigns on the themes of how dysfunctional and dangerous the federal government is, thus mining Americans political DNA about "gubmint", and then once elected, prove it.

And any debate about health care must acknowledge that the for-profit health care industry is the problem and must be destroyed. This is an industry that hires doctors and analysts to deny care to patients in order to increase profits. It is an industry that causes half of all bankruptcies. And the 20,000 Americans who died last year because they did not receive adequate care condemn these corporations as complicit in murder.

That is the bargaining position that the Democrats should have started from. There ought to have been weeks and weeks when that message was pounded home from every Democratic quarter in the country, piling anecdote upon anecdote, statistic upon statistic, along with video clips interviewing scores of actual American citizens who have been the victims of this horrid joke of a health care system. What went wrong? Either inside the Beltway Democrats are clueless fuck ups or their real agenda was to curry the favor and money of the health care industry and never wanted real change in the first place. At the end of the day, it'll be the Democrats who sell us all out. And I despise the current Republican Party.

Obama didn't mishandle anything! He had a impossible battle to fight from the very beginning. A lot of us knew it would never happen..tailwind

Obama and the Democrats never had a chance. Rush Limbaugh wins, and healthcare reform loses… GWinOhio

Tailwind, GW, no you did not know that. But if you believed that it was going to be a difficult and uphill struggle, which I can believe you did know because most people who can read know this, then why is it that the President of the United States and the leaders of the Democratic Party, who have studied health care for 60 years, did not know that? They certainly developed a piss poor strategy for countering what they had to have known was going to be a huge pushback from all the major stakeholders in the current system. At least that is one lesson they should have learned from the Clintons. Their strategy, such as it has been, was to bring Big Pharma and the Hospital Corporations through the back door of The White House and strike a deal with them to give the Democratic Party the money they would otherwise have given to the Republicans. Then the Obama Administration gives the assignment entirely over to Congress, as if they’re a school class, while only giving them vague guidelines and suggestions about the material he wants covered and leaving them to design the test. Both that and a totally crackpot strategy to work with the other Party, a Party made completely irrelevant by the voters across the country over the last two election cycles.

Stop finding ways to excuse the Democrats, who are in control and upon whom every potential failure in policy will ultimately bear on their heads.

I may have said this before, but it bears repeating: I despise the current Republican Party.

Leftist Lunatic Base.

Such ignorant ranting twaddle. How tiresome. This lunatic wouldn't know a genuine leftists from a chicken wing.

I've learned something new tonight reading the comments past Page 10 on any article that appears on Salon, with the exception of Green Greenwald's. I've learned that after Page 10 the comments get sillier and stupider and fuller of the most inane tiresome regurgitated bullshit that Americans have managed to stuff into their tiny little heads. Alec D'Tocquville writing 160 years ago about Americans in his epic, "Democracy in America", said that there seemed no end to the baseless, groundless, fear mongered baloney that most Americans can be convinced of. That isn't a direct quote but that was the gist of what he said. If he was able to read most of these posts past page 10, Alec would have said, and I quote, "I told you so."